I was having lunch with a colleague who’d just ordered a
Diet Coke. “My girlfriend tells me that this stuff is going to kill me,” he
said.

I looked at the Diet Coke. Then I looked at him. “Are you
serious? She knows you’re a smoker right?” I held my arms out to my sides as if
they were scales balancing the weight of the two unhealthy behaviors. “Quit
smoking or quit Diet Coke? Which would have more of an impact?”

We both laughed and the conversation moved onto other
topics. Still now it seems I can’t help but notice all the research being
published about artificial sweeteners, and not all of it is good.

Let’s start with the disease we all worry about: cancer. The
studies have gone back and forth regarding whether sweeteners—and especially
aspartame—lead to cancer. Any good debater could find studies both for and
against this link. This past December, results from the Nurse’s Health and
Physician Health studies – two of the largest and longest running studies in
history – found that men who consumed more than one daily diet soda were at an
increased risk for two types of cancer: non-Hodgkin lymphomas and multiple myeloma. The same did not hold true for women. It’s important to
note, however, that this result was not robust enough to rule out chance. In
other words: aspartame might cause cancer. And it also might not.

But the research is getting a lot clearer when it comes to
another very common disease: Type 2 Diabetes. When French researchers followed
the dietary habits and health outcomes of more than 66000 women over 14 years, they
determined that women who consumed the most artificial sweeteners were just as
likely to develop type 2 diabetes as women who consumed the same amounts of
sugar sweetened beverages.

If you aren’t quite ready to part with your diet soda of
choice, you could rightly argue that this French study is just a mere
association and not proof of causality. Isn’t it possible that people who drink
diet drinks tend to be overweight? We know that obesity raises risk for type 2
diabetes. Maybe the culprit is not the drink, but rather the person drinking
the drink, right?

Perhaps, but new research sheds doubt on that theory. Researchers
from Washington University of Medicine in St. Louis studied sucralose (the
sweetener in Splenda) to see how it affected blood sugar levels in obese
people. When study participants drank a Splenda sweetened beverage and then
consumed a sugar drink, their blood sugar spiked more than when they had water
followed by a sugar drink

How is this possible? It could be that our cells have the
ability to recognize any sweet flavors—whether that sweetness comes from sugar
or an artificial sweetener—and that flavor detection is all that is needed to
set the stage for a rise in blood sugar.

So if you are overweight or obese, diet drinks probably are
not your weight loss answer.

They’re also probably not the best choice for pregnant
women. Researchers from the Statens Serum Institute in Denmark studied the
health records of more than 60,000 women who had filled out food logs during
their pregnancies. Mothers who’d consumed artificially sweetened soft drinks during
pregnancy were more likely to give birth to children who eventually developed
asthma, compared to mothers who consumed no artificially sweetened beverages. Drinks
sweetened with sugar, however, were not associated with asthma.

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ABOUT THE WRITERS

TIM DARRAGH has been reporting and editing the news for 30 years, most of it at The Morning Call. For much of that time, he's been doing award-winning investigative and in-depth reporting projects. Tim created the three-year-long Change of Heart project, and wrote a series on the state's fractured food inspection system that led to widespread improvements in food safety. Meantime, that novice jogger you see plodding along the streets around Bethlehem Township? That would be Tim.